Page 4 of The Maverick
A woman in her seventies dropped her hiking stick at the lip of the river, where the gravel gave out and the water began. Ibent and picked it up before she could try, handed it back with a smile.
"There you are, ma'am."
"Oh, thank you, sweetheart." She had a face like a pleasant apple. "My husband always says I'd lose my head if it weren't pinned on."
"Husbands are mostly right about wives, ma'am, but not on this. You strike me as a woman who knows where her head is."
She laughed, delighted. "What's your name, darlin'?"
"Stephen," I lied.
"You from Texas, Stephen?"
"That obvious?"
"Only the way you saidma'am."
She patted my arm and waded in ahead of me, her husband shuffling behind with the cautious half-step of a man who'd been told by his cardiologist what the consequences of slipping would be. I waited a beat, then offered him my elbow on a particularly mean stretch of rounded river rock. He took it without comment and let it go three steps later, also without comment—the unspoken transaction of two men who both understood that pride was a real thing and so was a broken hip.
"You good, sir?"
"I'm good."
"Atta boy."
I left them at the first wide bend, where the water was slow and they could pick their own path. People liked it, near as I could tell, when you helped them and then got out of their way. I'd learned that early. From my mother, mostly.
The water was cold the way mountain water is cold—a clean cold that bit into your shins and woke up muscles you hadn't been asking to wake up. The wading stick steadied me on the rocks. I moved at a steady pace, not pushing, just walking. There was a rhythm to it once you found it. Eyes scanning ahead threesteps. Stick testing the underwater ground. Weight transferred. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. After a while it was meditation.
The canyon walls climbed up around me, narrowing, until the sky was a thin blue ribbon overhead. Light came in sideways and gold and broke on the water. A cliff swallow shot past my ear close enough to feel the air move.
I smiled.
I was good at enjoying my work. I always had been. It was a thing my brothers used to tease me about back home—that Tommy could find the bright side of a flat tire on a back road in August. I didn't think it was a virtue. I thought it was just a thing.
Some people were born to find the joy and some weren't, and the rest of it—your discipline, your skill, your willingness to do the hard thing—that was on you. The joy part was a gift. I tried not to waste it.
One mile became two. Two became three.
The rock I'd picked sat in a wide bend where the canyon opened up just enough to catch a long ribbon of sun. The slab of sandstone caught the light like it had been put there for the purpose, dry and warm and big enough for a man to sit on with his pack beside him. I'd scouted it on day three, when I'd done my first run of the Narrows on a recon walk. Knew the second I saw it.
There was nowhere to run. Sheer rock walls. The river the only way in or out. The acoustics weren't bad either—canyon ate sound, threw it up. A scream up here would land somewhere a quarter mile away as a confused echo, and most tourists would assume it was a bird.
The perfect place for lunch.
The perfect place for killing.
I climbed onto the rock, dried my hands on my pants, and unwrapped a sandwich. White bread. Smooth peanut butter.Grape jelly. I'd made them at five-thirty that morning at the kitchenette counter. They were perfect.
I waited.
Davari came around the bend fifteen minutes later, working harder than he wanted me to know he was working. He was a fit man in the way money makes a man fit—surface fit, gym-floor fit. The kind of body that could deadlift three plates and run out of breath chasing a cab. He saw the rock and the sun and his face did the small unconscious thing fit men do when they can't wait to sit down.
He stumbled. The hiking stick saved him. He recovered, glanced up, saw me.
I called over, easy and friendly, the way you'd call to a man you'd seen on the trail before.
"Hey—stick to the left side coming up. The right's a knee-killer. I went face-first a minute ago. Beautiful stuff, but not great for the dignity."
